


Omnivore

by Zafaria



Category: Pirate101 (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-22
Updated: 2020-06-23
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:46:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24852547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zafaria/pseuds/Zafaria
Summary: See your face wasn't quite as I remember, but I know that wicked shape to your smile...
Kudos: 4





	1. Chapter 1

It became very apparent why the notches and spokes on gears were called “teeth”.

“Teeth.” 

The word didn’t feel right between hers.

“ _ Teeth _ ,” she said as she looked up the axle of the machine.

Overhead the gears whirred. They were the size of whole islands. They reminded her in part of Brabanzio Villa, with the notches like the little arches in the marble portico surrounding the courtyard. Except there wasn’t anything that jutted out hungrily, all of the columns were lined safely underneath the connected annulets, like their large flat heads were connected by a surrounding comfort. They were aligned. They were the flat, humble teeth of an unthreatening herbivore ground down to the gums, leveled.

Then to either side of the walkway that opened up from the dock and formed the decking around the core, there were gears connected like waterwheels that had sharp spokes, like the edges of chainsaws. Malicious things, best kept away from. Undulling shark teeth.

And all the while looking at the structure she clenched hers, then looked in front of her and saw a most fascinating sight, one she had not seen for months: Phule. He beckoned her over from beyond some destroyed marines, with his long mask. Kane gave him a mouth, and on the lighthearted side, Phule smiled. On the stern side of his face, he scowled with his mouth bitterly propped open. But there were no teeth, and it was hollow and dark underneath the mask, and she could only ever imagine what drove him, what gave him spark to continue forward in his elusive, whimsical way.

She approached, treading carefully past the guards, wary of Phule and his ruses, that the hands of one of the constructs might reach from below and trip her up.

Phule looked at her straight as she approached, but when she came within distance of conversation, he turned his bitter side to her. 

“It took you long enough to get here!” His mask was an exaggerated vaudeville one, polished black to look like an onyx or marble, or something else heavy. It was theatrical, but the droop to his mustache curling downwards and the fine feathers on his brow lifted up in warning scared her. And then he turned the other way, to show his amicable side, but also pointedly looking towards one of her guests.

“What are  _ you  _ doing here?” The “you” was drawn out, incredulous. It was to the old man, and the word was so sharp, so cruel, she worried it had drawn his blood, would make him collapse in the wind of it, as it began to echo into his ears. But Phule again proved difficult to predict as he reached his hand out toward the old man, and the old man took his clammy little clockwork hand in kind, between his own warm, large and gnarled fingers drawn out from wringing and tinkering. She stepped back a little and saw Gazpaccio’s warm, closed-mouth smile and his breathlessness, and she saw Phule's mustache twitch and his chin move as he seemed to mouth a word.

“ _ Grandfather _ .”

Gazpaccio called him a tormented soul, said he made an error when he built Kane to be heartless. He held Phule’s tiny, almost dainty hand. Honored to meet a machine made from machine, and perhaps a little sad that the poor creature was, inevitably, only in existence because of his mistake making Kane so many, many years ago. 

She held the sight a little longer. She wondered if Kane did have a heart from the beginning whether he would’ve still created, and if he did, would he have still made Phule as a joke, a tormented soul, or would he have been a little kinder.

“Fixing him will be difficult,” Phule said to the old man, then turned to the pirate. “You don’t know what the machine is for, do you?”

She shook her head. And then Phule flipped his, snapping his neck to the side. She thought he might be looking out over the decks for a second, but his wincing, malformed face began to speak.

“You don’t even know where you stand! You come in here to be some hero and yet you have not any idea how to begin!”

“Well. Yes. That’s been my entire journey up to this point, hasn’t it? I didn’t have an inkling of a clue of who you were when I first met you. How could we have predicted this, then?”

“Your ignorance could fill the Spiral!”

She frowned at this. She’d done wrong, spoken wrong. She didn’t like to think of the way things were in the places she had left behind, but she wondered, hungry and pained, what happened to the smoking buildings and ships in Westminster, or the vacated bodies of the wharf rats at Blood Shoals that no one tended to after they relinquished their ghosts.

Phule turned gently, back to his kind side. He explained slowly, patiently what the gears were, why there had been so many guards (but not why he had decided to clear the way for them). It was a Machine, a big Machine, to create a new First World from dust. To get rid of the imperfect things, like her.

“He’s your father. Why do you care?” she asked.

“As you can imagine, I have a rather unique perspective on imperfection.”


	2. Chapter 2

Inside was full of brass and whining, and glass making the kinds of windows that bubble outwards and give the sky the appearance of storm-wracked darkness from window tint. But she knew it was just appearances, there was no tint to the windows, and they were clear glass. The sky was, in all truth, really that grey, that dusty. She’d just seen it.

And then in front of them was an elevator, but it looked an awful lot like a giant birdcage made of brass. She looked around the whole room. There were metal bars, plates, screws, up all the walls like seams. Outside, she saw a flash of green lightning. It turned in her mind, all the explicit, drenching danger of what she was about to do, but she also wondered about all the mundane dangers, the overloading of the small lift with her whole crew, the conductivity of all the metal, whether it was too exhilarating or taxing to get up to the top.

She turned to check on the old man, to make sure he hadn’t collapsed. She worried about him, that a breeze in the wrong direction might make him stumble, or that a sudden burst of lighting would send him into cardiac shock. He looked ahead, but noticed her gaze almost instantly. He turned to her and smiled with warmth, the red of his splotchy, wrinkled face a rare hue amidst the ferocious and vehement green and the unpalatable and loud orange-yellow.

She opened her mouth as if to speak a little.

“We shall be fine. Perhaps a few of us at once on the lift, yes?”

She closed her mouth.

Then, she stopped worrying about the mundane things and the minute things. There was only room, energy, emotion left for worrying about the big things, big like the Machine they were traipsing in. Gazpaccio reached his hand out to her and she grabbed it.

“We can go first.”

They walked together and held hands up to that brass birdcage and stood uneasy on the platform. She looked to him again, and he looked back with a smile, his crooked browned teeth showing in the flush of red.

The elevator ascended with more whining, and the rest of the crew stood, breathless and faced skyward as the old man and the pirate were lifted out of sight, surrounded by the miring sea of green glass and slowly moving bronze.


	3. Chapter 3

Above them, there was a raised center, like a stage. The Armada enjoyed their drama, after all. The entire spectacle was flanked by dragoons with heavy chests, lithe battle angels and their crowned helmets, and marines that each had sharp, polished blade axes. Kane stood in the center, his rapier extended as if he had struck already and was now plumbing the depths of the victim further. 

The pirate and the old man were still holding each other’s hands. Gazpaccio unfurled his large fingers to step forwards, towards Kane and the blade. The old man began to fish something from a bag hanging on his side, sad and worn.

The pirate’s face furrowed. 

Gazpaccio spoke, lifting out a small red object in a little wood-frame box. He held it up to Kane, leveling it out over the chest of the automaton. And in one swift motion, Kane grabbed his flintlock off his belt, and in the arc it took for him to raise his arm and line it up with the box, he flicked the lock back and it slammed into a little piece of flint and sparked. 

The heart clamored out of the old man’s hands and fell to the floor, shattered. 

She began to step forward, her mouth opened again as she moved towards the old man and held her arms out sheepishly, but somewhere above the man’s head, in the fuzziest reaches of her vision, a little fire shone and flashed out, and Gazpaccio crumbled on the floor before her, only a reach away.

She shouted, something feeble, something useless, and Kane just looked at her, interested and unfazed.

“Forget the map. Your race is over, and I’ve won.” His voice was smooth, but also crisp. It was inhuman, but interrupted by little jars and static and crackles. 

She cried and tiptoed around the body of the old man, and as soon as her foot cleared his head, she ran and lept up towards the automaton’s foot, pulling at the empty, leathery tip of his boot. Kane flicked her off and sent her into the floorboards like it was a joke, taunting trapped, sacred, starving animals in a pit.

“I’ve made a new map. Took Marco Pollo twenty years; I made mine in twenty days.”

He said something else then walked away as she sat there on the ground staring at her knees, slumped next to the old man. Her parents hadn’t even been gone for fifteen years. She chased tattered, reeking and bleeding pieces of the map across the entire universe for only twenty days, and just to find that they were useless. Entirely useless. Her backbreak pulling at the lines and the sharp pains in her elbow from holding the wheel and gently guiding it, suspending her arms for hours. All of it useless.

The machines began to swarm around her and the old man. Her crew charged in and began shooting, disassembling, flinging things, knives, and yelling at each other. She stayed on the ground and felt that whole universe she had travelled and helped mend falling apart as gears would begin to grind into bedrock.


	4. Chapter 4

Her crew dragged her up by the elbows from her daze, interrupting her view of the ceiling and the wooden floorboards holding up the top of the machine.

“Come on! It isn’t over yet,” Bonnie said, pulling her by the arms, nearly tripping and floundering on a spiral set of unrailed marble stairs. Each little cliff in the stars reached up, like the serrated edges of some carnivore’s teeth. She stumbled over her footing again and again until the flight of stairs ended and they reached the top of the layer where Kane was standing minutes before. He had backed himself towards an edge now, near another bucket-lift.

It beeped. Well, something did. A little purple orb emerged from behind two bronzed, curved sheets. It was polished to a shine, like a singular, faulty eye found on a spider or a bug or a squid. There were no separations, it was one unending sphere of a sickly, poison pink.

“No. Not yet. Prepare my escape, and destroy this chamber,” Kane said, looking at the pink sphere.

“No.”

There was silence. The Machine refused to obey the perfect creator, and this had left everyone and everything in the room a little stumped. Then Kane began yelling, turning almost infantile.

“I gave you an order and you will obey!”

The pirate looked bewildered and still tear-streaked, staring at the plaster man, watching his grip on the railing around the lift tighten and his legs straighten out. He was preoccupied waiting for the Machine; he didn’t notice she was staring.

Between her and Kane, the floorboards opened up and a series of automatons, the same kinds of battle-angels and dragoons from before, were lifted up into the light. Kane turned and went into the bucket-lift, leaving the pirate to resolve his insubordinate, imperfect Machine.

The pirate and her crew turned to one of their favorite solutions for pretentious and condescending things: they beat the core pillars surrounding the chamber until they were smashed and compromised and the Machine was left a stuttering and defunct mess.

And then they all grasped on to each other, surrounding the pirate in a ring of arms as they clung to the overburdened lift to Kane.


	5. Chapter 5

At that top floor, there was a checkerboard tiling of black and white polished marble. She stepped up towards the squares, but not on them, then looked at Kane.

He stared back. Around him, he was flanked by even rows of other automatons, some they had seen and one they did not recognize.

“Allow me to introduce my greatest of creations, the Queen,” Kane said with a bow. The Queen let her hand-held mask down, revealing a slim plaster-white face with pointed, stabbing features.

“Kill them all.”

The machines surged forward on the board, and the pirate looked back to her companions only to find that they were rushing forwards, determined and set on their targets and gritting their teeth. 

She heard a clatter as Bonnie Anne bashed something with the stock of her musket, the loud pangs of Gracie’s golem and her wrench hitting reinforced metal, the deft and feathery swish of the Queen’s rapier cutting air, and then a sharp little sound as she drew blood. There was grunting, small vocalizations, little things, and wheezes, but not screaming or yelling. The crew was focused. There was no fear here any longer.

And the pirate found herself walking forward, straight into the Queen at first, the unpredictable and perfected creation. She watched the Queen twirl and jab as she approached, but she was readying her hand on her own dagger, preparing to plunge it through the machine.

She stepped next to her, but as she did the Queen turned, changed direction and began to trust the rapier forward precisely, exacting. It caught the pirate and stabbed her. She cried and howled in pain as the blood began to emerge from the deep pits the sword had made.

And then, a pipe wrench smacked upwards and collided with the Queen’s lifted sword, with such a strike it bent the thin blade backwards, crinkled it at an angle. The pirate was in mincing pain, but she reached back for her own daggers, and did as she imagined she would, cutting through first the heavy silk and satin of the dress on the Queen, then hitting and piercing metal. Then striking copper springs, then going even further, piercing another layer of metal--the backside of the machine. After making the through-and-through cut, the pirate ripped up and down, wildly, aimlessly, hoping to deconstruct the thing piece-by-piece from the outside using something as imprecise as a sword.

And as she did this, Gracie turned to cover the pirate’s back, and the golem moved in as Kane gently and regally stepped into the scene, as if to try and salvage his creation. 

The golem took its mace-arm and spiked it directly into Kane’s mask. It left holes in the exterior. And then Gracie struck him from behind his head, sending him lurching forward. As the clatters of the other machines echoed around the smoothed, level floors, the rest of the crew drew in bellicose and ruthless, ready to shred apart the last remaining machine. The pirate was now kneeling and continued to wildly fling her arms about and eviscerate the Queen, teeth barred and panting.

There was a ring of sounds, of metal, of lightning, of musket powder burning, and boots stomping.

She turned around, and then, there wasn’t anything at all. Everything was collapsed where it had stood.

Gears overhead continued to whir. The delirious and exasperated crew all kneeled to the ground to catch their breath, and before them, purple threads, the same sick color of that orb from the previous floor, materialized, and pulled at Kane.

They all followed with their eyes, but no one dared reach for the automaton. Another moment of stunned puzzlement.

There was a great light, like the lighting outside, but this one was condensed, inside, coursing through Kane from his face downward. His mask popped off and fell to the floor, scraped and broken. She winced as she saw his head snapping back at a ninety-degree angle and something extracted from the mess of wires and copper lining the inside. He was so limp, so lifeless, so...real. And just like that, after the shockwave had course through him, after the machine, the true Machine had done its work and gotten what it desired, it tossed him to the floor like a discarded toy with a satisfied thump that was heavier and sharper than anything organic. Like something that ran out of batteries. 

He lay on the floor in the same, crumpled, grotesque way that his father did two floors below. All around them, things stopped turning, the flat faces of the spokes of the gears shuddering to stop.

And behind where the plaster mask used to be, she could see clearly now that the teeth of all the brass gears had finally stopped their whirring.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kind of like. A half-fleshed out idea. Sorry.


End file.
